Senior Robotics Engineer, Controls

About this role

ABOUT THE ROLE

Join a small engineering team at a defense technology company developing autonomous systems to counter drone threats. As a senior individual contributor, you will own the precision motion control stack, from control architecture and state estimation to hardware testing and field characterization.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Design and tune precision pointing and tracking control loops, including closed-loop control from sensor input to actuator command.

- Build state estimation and sensor fusion across IMUs, encoders, and vision feedback.

- Identify and model gimbal, mount, and actuator dynamics, then compensate for resonance, backlash, friction, saturation, and other nonlinearities.

- Develop simulation and hardware-in-the-loop infrastructure to validate controls and reduce the sim-to-real gap.

- Characterize system performance on hardware and during field testing, and document control designs and tuning standards.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- At least 4 years of robotics experience, including designing and tuning closed-loop controllers on physical motion hardware.

- Strong grounding in classical and state-space control, including LQR and MPC, with experience applying these methods to real systems.

- Hands-on state estimation and sensor fusion experience using Kalman, EKF, UKF, or complementary filters.

- Experience with system identification, frequency-domain tuning, resonance compensation, and managing latency and jitter in real-time loops.

- Modern C++ for real-time control, plus Python or MATLAB/Simulink for modeling and analysis.

- Familiarity with servo drives, brushless motors, encoders, and IMUs, and the ability to work across mechanical, electrical, and software disciplines.

- Experience building control simulations and validating them against hardware.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

Base salary: $180,000 to $200,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

LOCATION

On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.